The Ego's Resistance to Change

By now you have probably experienced the rebound effect, a regression into old behavior that happens when we attempt to move in new directions. Don't panic. Just let it ride it's course, knowing that you are more than the compulsive response of your ego.



The comfort zone that we create for ourselves is how we maintain a sense of feeling normal, adequate to the task of living. It is a function of the ego to try to maintain a sense of being in control so that this level of comfort can be maintained. But, when we take a look inside and decide that a few changes need to happen, often there is an experience of fear. That fear is you brushing against your ego. It whispers, 'Leave well enough alone, don't bother. It's too much work. Things are fine just the way they are.'

Often, when you open that door anyway and go through it, your ego gives it a push to hit you in the rear end as if to say, 'See, I told you so.' Yet, if you just keep walking in that new direction, the feeble attempt of the ego to keep you a prisoner of your own limitations will gradually subside, unable to reach you. The door is only wide enough to keep hitting you if you remain stationary on the threshold.

I notice this temporary change in behaviors right away when I try to change how I eat. It's about to be spring, and every year at the yoga studio where I teach we do a group cleanse. It's kind of like lent, only different. It's an opportunity to let go of the old and embrace the new by giving the digestive tract a rest. The choice of how to do that depends on the person. It could mean just giving up sugar or wheat for a week. What makes it difficult is wavering on the threshold of choice. What makes it powerful is commitment backed by clear intention. A leap of faith, if you will, that it will make a significant difference in the quality of your life if you stick to your guns.

What makes AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT so powerful is that you learn to confront change as a practice. You learn to test what's safe and what's not. You venture into the realm of the New having assured yourself that it can be done, having tested the waters. You learn to apply the scientific method to your own experience to show yourself that there is another way. So, persist in your quest. Trust yourself. You are greater than your ego and your limitations both.

It's said that the only thing we can count on in life is that things will change. Part of what makes us old before our time is holding on to what once was, resisting the inevitable. It's our resistance that makes us rigid like a horse that braces and will not move. The more I work with people, the more I know for sure that it's our resistance to change that keeps our minds rigid and our bodies, being dutiful servants, simply follow the lead of the mind.

Motivation

Finding the motivation to initiate a change in behavior is what holds most people back. There is no question that AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) can help you initiate major shifts in your life, but how do you get into the habit of doing it?



There are four keys to making any substantial change in behavior. This subject has fascinated me for years precisely because I work with people actively engaged in looking at - or actively avoiding - how their lifestyle choices create pain and suffering. Why is it that different people respond differently to the same situation? One person's blessing is another person's worst nightmare. How does that compute?

Key #1 Define Your Values

What is really important to you that you kind of gloss currently? Becoming more conscious of what is really important to you is different than spending your time doing what has to be taken care of. Of course there are things that you have to do, like dishes, car maintenance and washing your sheets, but how do you find the impetus to do things that are above and beyond what has to be handled? Find the value in what is important to you personally.

ATM is a form of self-care that allows what is really relevant to bubble up from your subconscious mind. The very activity itself lends itself to connecting more deeply with what you value. But what if you are having trouble just beginning, or just signing up for a class that you know on some level you would like to do? What then? Remember that the FELDENKRAIS Method is not just about becoming more physically mobile or dealing with physical pain. It's about becoming more fluid in your thinking, in your solutions, in pursuing your bliss and making your life more fulfilling on all levels.

A Motivational Exercise

Free-writing in the morning, right after you wake up is a great way to allow your values to guide you into new behaviors. Think about what's bothering you, or what's on your mind. What issue is up for you? Give yourself ten minutes to complete a series of seven sentences around that issue and you will find, not only do you have more clarity, but you are accessing your subconscious intelligence. Often you already know what to do, you just need to allow yourself to get in touch with it. The issue you are working with fills in the blank. The sentence stem you begin with is this: "If I were more conscious about what is really important to me, I would..." Fill in the blank, seven times, each day for at least five days.

Commitment is the decision to carry out an intention even when the initial excitement has faded. When you feel yourself lagging, remember the initial enthusiasm and excitement you felt. When you 'don't feel' like it, remember that you can change how you feel by changing how you move - which may be as simple as free-writing about what you would do if you were more conscious about what is valuable to you. From there, you will find it easy to move right on in to a full blown ATM by following along with an audio cd or calling to sign up for support with a live instructor.

Key #2 Create Bite-Size, Measurable Goals

For example, improving your posture might be a goal you aspire to because you have made the connection between slumping and pain in your shoulders and neck. For most people, improving their posture seems an insurmountable, overwhelming task. But going to an ATM class weekly for an hour over six weeks and doing a 40 minute ATM at home with a cd once a week is both finite and measurable. It's a bit of a catch 22, you cannot stay connected to the overall goal because you can't remember how good it felt to stand upright, supported by your skeleton without having your muscles work overtime to keep you from falling over. Yet, if you break it down into measurable steps, you can create a sense of success, of staying on track and of working towards your goal.

There is one catch - sometimes things take longer than anticipated. Sometimes having an initial plan is not really enough, it's just a beginning. When you bump into this caveat, it's time to sit down again and repeat the process from the beginning - with compassion, no judgement. It's called re-evaluating your goals and it's an important part of staying realistic, motivated and consistent.

Key #3 Avoid the "All or Nothing" Trap

Would you give up earning money just because you missed a day at work? Of course not. Whatever happens, the show must go on, right? Well, what difference would you see in your life if you applied the same attitude to your personal goals? When you fall off the horse, get up, dust yourself off, and get back on. Be more conscious. How? Apply the basic principles of ATM: go more slowly, pay more attention, and observe your reactions and experiences with compassion. Be a witness to your own learning without guilt, shame or judgment, but with attentive support, acceptance of what is and compassion for yourself.

Key #4 Find Accountability

Get the individual attention you need to monitor how you are doing, with someone who can help role model these behaviors for you. When you commit to a live class over a series of weeks, your ATM teacher can give you feedback and encouragement. Teaching ATM is all about teaching people how to be there for themselves. It's about supporting you in becoming more attentive to your own needs, more accepting of who you are and more compassionate with your personal foibles and lack of clarity around some things. We all have places where we are stuck or where we don't always act in our own best interest. Find the support you need to realize your own intentions.

If this idea appeals to you, the idea of having someone coach you through the process of making significant changes in your way of relating to yourself, call me, I will be happy to work with you to flesh out your goals and to stick to them! This would involve an initial consultation, and weekly follow-up by phone and/or email. - Gabrielle

Toward A New Definition of Success

What gets in the way of initiating those changes you want to make? Perhaps your definition of success is self-limiting.


It is the time of year for new resolutions. So what needs to be different for those new goals to materialize? What makes this year different from last year? It's possible that your idea of success is getting in your way. If success, to you, is something amorphous and vague, like loosing weight (how much?), or feeling better (better than what?), or taking better care of yourself (in what way?), chances are your definition of success needs to be updated.

When you don't know where to begin, it helps to be held accountable. That's one aspect of what I do. I support you in learning to stand for what you want. For each person, it's different and so I create a safe space in the classroom for you to discover what success means, to you.

It helps to focus on competing with your own past performance, to not compare yourself to others. By learning to assess how you are doing, you bring the focus back to what is relevant. By learning to cultivate your ability to sense yourself, you loose the habit of denial, of recrimination and judgement. I have worked for years with meditation techniques that try to teach people to stop being judgemental intentionally. But I have not found that it works. As the ancient Chinese proverb states, 'What you resist persists.' In the FELDENKRAIS® Method of AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT®, you will learn to observe without reaction, to assess without judgement, without resistance.



It helps to change your focus from results to learning Process Oriented Wellness. In this framework, your progress is measured by sticking with the program, because that is an easily attainable goal. It's measured by staying with the process, because that's what creates quality of life. Waiting for something to happen puts you and your experience on hold. Learning to focus on making the present moment more comfortable, more tangible and more solid brings back the fullness of being alive, the recognition of what you want and how to keep moving towards it.



And lastly, by focusing on and quantifying things you usually ignore, you make them real. ATM creates improvements and shifts in your emotional states, your dreams, your sleeping patterns, your daily comfort levels, your energy levels, your creativity, your sense of confidence, your level of contentment and emotional stability. These are all measurable things. Yet, the emphasis is no longer on external measurement. The emphasis is on internal measurement. How does it feel to you? That is what really matters. This is your life, not the life of a lab rat or a specimen in a science experiment. Take back your power by taking charge of your ability to sense improvement, contentment, comfort and aliveness and build whatever life you wish to from here, at the intersection of experience and choice.

What Is ATM Good For? What is Integration?

What is this picture? Is it light? Is it shadow?

This is a close-up of water. Given that statement, you already 'know' several things about it without my saying so. You know that it has depth. You know that it is wet. You know without question what it feels like. You can imagine it. You may even be able to conjure up the taste and the smell of it. This means you have integrated water, not just intellectually, but as an experience. And since our bodies are composed of at least 80% water, it is vital to your survival to know it. You could survive with just the most minimal amount of water, but what would your quality of life be like? Even so with the rest of experience. If you have not integrated your knowledge, you can usually get by, even thrive to some extent. But how much more depth could you experience in your life if you focused on developing a sense of how to integrate your knowledge into concrete experience? This is the very essence of what you learn in ATM. Integration is a global skill that translates from movement into many other facets of living to produce a whole that works better than fragmented parts.

How can one approach have such a profound effect on so many aspects of living?

Sometimes, the obsessive desire to understand can interfere with improvement itself, because the very nature of the question is concerned with theoretical knowledge rather than embodied experience. On the level of ego, the mind is often concerned with 'doing it right.' We have all been socialized growing up to learn according to external measures of success. SAT scores, grades, even parental affection is often grounded in this compulsive need for proof of worthiness. Yes, even fitness, which is very popular right now, is for the most part externally motivated, rooted in the desire to look better, to be more attractive or desirable. Most systems of movement training have specific theories about optimal movement as if it were an empirical truth that exists outside ourselves, as if there were only one right way to do things. Poppycock.
Everyone is different.

Is this not the age of diversity? Do you want to learn how to celebrate it? Become fluent in noticing how unique you are yourself! Given that individual ATMs have no function in and of themselves, why bother doing them? In most fitness training, the directions are generic. Stretching is generic. When you bend over to stretch your hamstrings, no one mentions that it makes a difference if your pelvis is tilted forward or backward. Silly little details, such as these, will dictate whether or not you are stretching the hamstrings or using your pelvis in a way that generates length. You and your trainer may not know the difference, but your nervous system does, I guarantee it. By discounting your own experience in favor of someone else's authority on the subject, you loose access to the most sophisticated applications of your own brain by abdication. It is a great violation we have wrought upon ourselves with the advent of the scientific age, to honor only as valid that which can be measured by others. It leads to a habit of discounting our own impressions, ideas and experience.

Basic functionality is a fancy way of referring to the stuff we do every day: such as standing, sitting, lying down and getting up from lying down. These can all be done in a complex myriad of ways. Most of us pick a few standard ways that we stick to without question. We then wonder why, forty years later, we have certain muscles that ache more than others. ATM retrains you to use parts of yourself you have not used in years! That's entertaining to be sure, but it's only when you learn to integrate these new options into your daily repertoire that you find you have the juiciest fruits of your labor. The way you know you have integrated a new option is when you are doing something on your own, completely unrelated to ATM, and suddenly, you notice you have moved in a way that you never usually do and that it feels really good! But this is merely the most superficial level of change. When people say that improvement with the FELDENKRAIS Method is usually global, what that means is that the impact often leads to improvement in several areas of experience at once. This is true integration, it's improvement on several levels without intentional thought to making it happen. It's spontaneous. Yes, you have to put in the time to get the result, but the result may not happen at that time. It happens eventually. It may lead to physical improvement, or lessening of discomfort. It may lead to greater clarity of thought. It may improve problem solving ability. It may even result in greater creativity.

These green fields are a sight for sore eyes, relaxing, beautiful. Unless we see them as grass to be mown, as one more thing we have to take care of...Then, by our very thoughts, we create a prison from within our own minds...